


False Flowers

by ArgentNoelle



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Joker (2019)
Genre: Desire, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Magic, Magic Tricks, Morality, Obsession, POV Bruce Wayne
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:27:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26898163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArgentNoelle/pseuds/ArgentNoelle
Summary: On his birthday, Bruce gets a book on magic tricks. [post-movie]
Relationships: (future hints of), Arthur Fleck & Bruce Wayne, Batman/Joker
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	False Flowers

On his birthday, Bruce gets a book on magic tricks.

Alfred had taken him through the city, and Bruce had spent hours staring at toy cars, at true crime stories in Gotham’s huge bookstore with the towering staircases that curved around the sides. They’d stopped here after the museum. Before—when his parents were alive—he would have gone to the theater.

The movies were something all the Waynes could agree on. The perfect intersection between his father’s cultured society tastes and his mother’s passion for storytelling. This year, Bruce will not be going to the theater.

He doesn’t know if he could ever stand to go again.

Still. The feel of ink on paper reminds him of his mother. He picks up a pile of storybooks and Alfred accepts them gravely.

It is as they walk past a table quite near checkout that he sees the magic book. Bruce stares. The image of a silken top-hat with those words underneath, colored kerchiefs being pulled out in strings, a terrified looking rabbit. He picks the book up with one hand, without speaking, and adds it to the pile.

Alfred frowns down. “Are you sure that is quite… appropriate, master Bruce?” he asks. It is the only opinion he has offered on Bruce’s choices all day.

“I need it, Alfred,” Bruce says quietly. For a moment, it seems as though Alfred is going to argue, but then he merely sighs.

“As you wish, sir,” he says.

It is the first thing Bruce pages through, in the car on the way home, his stomach still turning with too much ice-cream, his lips sticky-sweet with the taste of vanilla and caramel.

 _Coin tricks_. _Table tricks, with glasses, napkins, knives and forks_ _. Hidden compartments. Novelty wands._

He stares at a picture of a wand, closed and then opened with multicolored flowers. Something sticks in his throat, the flowers blurring before his eyes. He feels vaguely ill.

He probably shouldn’t read in the car. It’s making him carsick.

He closes the book, and looks through the storybooks instead.

But even if he tries to forget it, the magic book is still there, tucked in at the bottom of the bookshelf in his bedroom. It is only a matter of time before he opens it again.

Opens it again, and stares at the pictures. At the wand, open and closed, a false bouquet. He remembers holding it in his hand. Remembers staring into Arthur—the Joker’s—warm brown eyes.

 _They’re not real_ , Joker had tried to explain.

Bruce lies on his bed and tries to imagine the difference between a real and a false bouquet. The differences are obvious, of course. Natural scents versus perfume, silken petals versus the softness that can only bruise. One cannot be hidden. The other always is, until the reveal. Symbolically, there must be a difference. Perhaps many differences. Perhaps the differences continue ad infinitum, like fractals. Perhaps, in fact, there is _no_ difference.

Perhaps he is overthinking it all.

He tends to do that.

He oughtn't to want everything in the magic book the way he does. Like a kind of hunger, a tingling _need to know it all_ that makes him feel sick. Everything that happened—the riots, the clowns—should have cured him of any interest in such things. How can he continue to be so fascinated by the very menace that embodies the unpredictable chaos of what had destroyed them—it’s not _right_ —

It’s just a book of magic tricks.

Nothing more.

He knows, as he has known with a terrible certainty since that night, that he will grow up to become a crime fighter, though the details are still vague and unformed.

But his heart—his heart is beguiled by magic.


End file.
